The Hero System Glitched And Now It Pays Me to Love My Assassin Wives

"Come down to the dock. You’ll want to see this from the edge."

Miralys Fae arrived on the tenth day, at the hour when the river turns brown, and she didn’t come alone.

Eleven barges came with her.

I went down with Zelina and the harbor master and half the guard, and stood on the stone edge counting hulls until I ran out of easy numbers.

All eleven were riding low to the load line.

"Are they loaded?" the harbor master asked.

"To the ribs," Miralys said, jumping onto the dock without waiting for the gangplank. "Twelve thousand tons. All of it."

"The last shipment crosses tomorrow."

"The last shipment is here." She pulled off a glove and threw it at my chest for me to hold. "It crossed Sunday. Upriver."

Zelina let out one short laugh and covered her mouth.

"Tell it to me in order."

"I reached Corven on the fourth day. The steel wasn’t at Corven, it was at the landing below, in five stacks, under tarps, unguarded." She tied her hair back while she talked. "Eleven men for twelve thousand tons."

"Because nobody steals what’s about to be given to them."

"That’s what I thought." She lifted her chin toward the water. "Sunday at midnight they started moving barges at night, in a hurry, like somebody had moved their date up."

"Somebody did."

Miralys looked at me sideways and asked nothing more. She learned that from her father, I imagine. You don’t ask an ally about his marked card in front of the harbor master.

"Three captains and all three alive," she went on. "The one on the red barge asked me to break a finger so he could say I forced him. I broke it. He’s a good man."

The captain came down the gangplank with a bandaged hand and stopped six paces off, waiting for somebody to tell him whether he was under arrest.

"Name?"

"Hallis, Majesty. Red Barge out of Corven."

"Did you know what you were carrying?"

"I knew the weight. Not who for." He looked at his hand. "By the third run I knew, and I ran it anyway."

"Why?"

"Because they paid in advance and I have four crew."

"You keep the barge," I said. "And next week you carry the cargo south for me, with papers and crown wages."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you keep the barge anyway and I hire somebody else."

Hallis stared at me a long while, the second man in two days to go looking for the trap and not find it.

"And the south?" I asked Miralys.

She stopped there.

She turned toward the water and went four breaths without speaking.

"The south listened. Eight hundred men in the Vareth town hall." She wiped her hand on her thigh. "I read them the manifests. I read them the real garrison strengths. I told them where the steel came from and what it was for."

"And?"

"And a sixty year old smith stood up and asked whether the emperor who burned his street had sent me to say it."

"What did you tell him?"

"That he didn’t. That he gave me the papers and let me choose."

"Did they believe you?"

"Two hundred didn’t." She took her glove back from my hand. "They left that night by the old road. I don’t know where they are and I don’t know who’s waiting for them."

Twelve thousand tons of steel tied up at my dock and two hundred southern men loose with whatever the chancellor had put in their heads.

A good settlement almost never arrives whole.

"And the six hundred?"

"The six hundred loaded the barges. Three days." She pulled the glove on slowly, finger by finger. "The smith loaded too. Without speaking to me."

The harbor master cleared his throat and asked the only thing he cared about, which was where to unload.

"Nowhere. They sail again tomorrow."

"For where, Majesty?"

"South."

Miralys stared at me.

"Say that again."

"The steel goes back south. Distributed, registered, under the Council seal, with your name on the first line of the record." I dropped my voice because the harbor master was still there. "Plows, blades, tools for eleven districts. And two thousand pieces of armament for a southern garrison, under southern command, paid by the crown."

"That’s arming the south."

"That’s arming the south in front of everyone, on paper." I looked at her. "Decimus wanted them rising in secret on gifted steel. If they arm in daylight with a signed record, there’s no rebellion left to report. There’s a province with its own garrison, which is what your father asked for over fifteen years."

I called for ink and made room for the harbor master on a crate of tow, because a record written on the dock carries more weight before three hundred nobles than one drafted in the study.

"Write. Distribution of twelve thousand tons of steel, seized origin."

"Seized or donated, Majesty?"

"Seized. Let it be known who we took it from."

Miralys crouched on the other side of the crate and read upside down while the man wrote.

"Name the eleven districts," she said. "If it says the south, the distribution gets run by a clerk from here and he keeps three."

The harbor master looked at me.

"Do it the way she says."

"And the first line?"

"The name of Princess Miralys Fae. Mine underneath."

"They’ll call you a traitor in your own capital."

"Yes."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow."

"And the two hundred come back anyway."

"Maybe." I put my hands away. "But they come back to a district where the smith of Vareth has a new blade with my seal on it. That ruins the chancellor’s speech."

Miralys Fae went still, and then did something I hadn’t seen in eleven weeks.

She laughed. Once, short, and it left her right away.

"Eleven days gone," she said, "and you’re still the most expensive man I know."

We climbed the stone steps. Halfway up, the air opened blue.

[DING]

[Investment tracking: positive.]

[Concept: you disarmed a war by arming both sides.]

[Valuation: SSS x1000]

[Integrity: 31% ▼ 28%]

[HERO, you calculated that one. I’m sorry.]

And underneath, in smaller letters, a line that didn’t belong to the System I knew.

[Carrier load: 71% ▲ 74%]